The Fix (17 page)

‘Thanks, Wayne.'

The lane was dark and litter-strewn and had all the ambience of a crime scene but, the moment I got to the end, the back door of the club opened and Hayley was standing there.

‘Hi,' she said. The light from inside threw her into silhouette, catching the shape of her off-duty rock-chick hair. ‘Glad I could drag you away from your big night.'

‘Hey, once my four-year-old niece fell asleep in the beanbag, the party was pretty much over. The last four or five hours have been relatively low-key.'

‘Do you want to have a look around?' she said. Her hand was still on the doorhandle. ‘Behind the scenes? See if there's anything bloggable?'

I couldn't, wouldn't, say no. She led me inside, into a corridor with old movie posters framed on the walls, Paint Your Wagon, State Fair. She had wiped away her Cleopatra stripper eyes and swapped the tourniquet-tight short shorts for something longer and probably comfortable. She was wearing a sleeveless top, and I developed a crush on her shoulders right away.

There was a door to a storeroom on the right and, beyond it, the corridor widened into a small lounge area, with a coffee machine and bar fridge, and sofas on either side of a coffee table. A stripper sat in classic naughty-nurse costume working studiously at a laptop. Next to
her, on the arm of the sofa, an espresso cup was balanced on top of a Penguin Classics edition of Proust.

As we passed through, Hayley was saying, ‘You'll have to meet the owner, Ross. He's a bit of a classic.'

Like Proust. Or perhaps not. I had a lifetime of TV to teach me what the classic strip-club owner was like, and I had never set out to meet one. I had a picture of him in my head: a hard man, a short fuse, a heavy bat. Every year or two he'd snap a leg with it when someone crossed him, and that way he kept his turf.

We came to an open door, and Hayley reached in and knocked on it.

Ross sat at his desk, looking like he had had far too many fist fights in the eighties, or perhaps the seventies. His hair was a steely grey and slicked back, his nose was mostly flattened and he had a scar where the skin had been split under one eye. He had a plate of biscuits in front of him, and a cup of tea.

‘Oh, g'day, love,' he said, sounding like anyone's shabby old favourite uncle. ‘You're off then, are you?'

He was broad and solid, with a fine pair of man boobs and a big-man's Mambo shirt. There was mess spread all across his desk. On the walls there were old black-and-white photos of Ross with boxers, his hair black and slicked back, nose flat even in those days.

‘Yep, done for the night,' Hayley told him. ‘Back late next week. I just thought I'd introduce you to a friend of mine. Josh. Josh, this is Ross.'

Ross came around the desk in a stiff-legged big-bellied way and he clenched my hand and shook it. It was a night for burly handshakes.

‘Ross Sammut. Always good to meet a friend of our Jett's. She's an asset, she is.' Hayley told him I was a
journalist and he said, ‘Oh, yeah, we run a clean operation here. Nothing to hide.' He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand and sniffed. I was surprised any air could pass up there at all. ‘It's a funny old game now. Not so many villains. Not since they disbanded Special Branch.' He gave a big throaty laugh. ‘Well, what can I tell you? The licensing boys are through us all the time, but they're okay. They come in here with those fluoro jackets – cock softeners, I call 'em. Kills the mood for a while.' I wanted to reach past him, to his desk, for a pen and paper. I could see an article happening, and he was dictating it. ‘You wouldn't believe it, but the steady money's in the merch. Well, maybe you would believe it. I mean, what bloke in this town hasn't scored one of our stubbie holders from the office Secret Santa?'

He went over to a nearby set of shelves and pulled a box open. He lifted out a black neoprene stubbie holder with their signature cartoon Annie Oakley on it and ‘Silver Spur' scrawled beneath her in a neon font.

‘Here you go,' he said, throwing it to me. ‘On the house. We've got caps, calendars, the lot. The real trick . . . the real trick to this –' he said it as if he was about to deliver a closely held secret – ‘is picking the right girls. You're nothing without the right girls. Too many of them who come in here are the wrong sort – messed up or drug-fucked or just plain soliciting. You can't be too careful. So, how do you know our Jett?'

It had been a monologue. I hadn't expected a question.

Hayley stepped in. ‘He was here last week in an involuntary capacity. A work thing. With the Korean guy.'

‘Not the turd guy?'

‘Yeah, the turd guy. I was here with the turd guy.' I said it twice because I couldn't resist.

Ross laughed again. ‘I bet you don't get to say that too often. Or maybe you do, and we can work with that too. Is it a Korean thing, do you know? Should we be expecting more interest in that kind of business?'

‘That's a good question. Apparently he thought it was an Australian thing. Heard about it in Manila.'

‘Before we get ahead of ourselves,' Hayley said, stepping in just as Ross's mind seemed set to turn to costings, ‘I'm not sure that you'd get a lot of the girls to do it.'

‘Not a problem, love. The wife's got me on a high-fibre diet.' He guffawed again at the ghastly prospect.

‘I don't know how big the market is for that, Ross.'

‘How big the market is for what, Hayles?' a voice said behind us. It came from a woman who looked late thirties, maybe forty. She was casually dressed and stood as if she had once been a dancer, all tone and muscle memory.

‘Ross letting one go Korean-style on the coffee table.'

‘Christ,' the woman said. ‘Talk about a niche market. Now, if we could clean our acts up for a second, there's someone I'd like you to meet, Ross. This is Vixen.'

‘Oh, good-oh,' Ross said, and took a step towards the door.

Vixen was in her early twenties and looked a particularly vampish kind of nervous. She had a long coat on and, beneath it, a complicated series of garments made of lace and leather. She was a stripper about to go to work
for the first time. Ross appraised her like a proud father looking at a daughter dressed for her formal.

‘Nice. Very nice. Very tasteful.' He said it without a trace of irony. ‘You'll turn some heads, love.'

‘Thanks, Ross,' she said, in a small self-conscious voice.

‘Now, you're all set to go? Everything feels right?' This was Ross the boxing trainer at work, psyching her up for the crowd. ‘You've got your ABN set up, and all that?' Ross was thorough. Had anyone – any of his numerous hangers-on – thought to ask Muhammad Ali about tax compliance as they fitted him with his mouthguard and walked him in to the Rumble in the Jungle? ‘Now, dance your tits off.'

‘Righto,' Vixen said, sounding more perky. ‘Here goes nothing.'

She turned, and sashayed out of the room stripper-style, with Ross saying, ‘Beautiful, love, beautiful,' behind her.

There was a burst of mood music from inside the club as a door opened further down the corridor. It was like a cheap sound effect and gone in about two seconds when the door closed again, with Vixen on the business side of it.

‘She'll do okay,' the woman I didn't know said. ‘Once she gets through the nerves.'

Ross nodded. He'd seen it a thousand times before.

‘Oh, sorry,' Hayley said. ‘I don't think I've introduced you. Mel, this is my friend Josh. Josh, this is Melanie. She's our dance trainer – expert in stage and personal – wardrobe adviser extraordinaire . . .'

Melanie rolled her eyes. ‘Solarium supervisor,
accommodation finder, ABN organiser, general dogs-body . . . Good to meet you.'

She shook my hand and, for less than a second, I thought I saw her give Hayley an is-this-your-new-boyfriend look. But it was gone too quickly and Hayley was moving on, ignoring it, if it had ever happened.

‘I'm about ready for that drink,' she said to me. ‘I'll see you two Thursday.'

‘Be good,' Melanie said, making it sound as if it was all about the sub-text.

‘I'll be great,' Hayley told her. Then she looked my way again, but at my chest, no eye contact. ‘Let's wrap the tour up and get out of here.'

She led me into the corridor and pointed out the gym and the kitchen. I wasn't really listening. I was fantasising about a conversation between Hayley and Melanie the den mother, Hayley telling her about this great guy she'd met, and how she wanted him right now. Me. It was crush logic at work, and I was falling under its wheels again. Hayley was still pointing, wrapping up the tour.

‘Beyond them you've got our change rooms,' she said. ‘And on the right there are the ways in to different bits of the club. All pretty much invisible on the other side, since it's dark in there and they're hidden by curtains or the bar. And that's about it.' She turned her back to it all and shrugged, as if it hadn't had the climax that a good story should. ‘Let's go.'

We left through the back door. It was darker out there than I remembered, and cooler. An umbrella tree hung over the bitumen courtyard and its battery of wheelie bins and crates of empty bottles.

‘Okay,' Hayley said. ‘How about Ric's?'

She led the way down the lane to Ann Street, and we crossed at the lights with the crowd. And perhaps I was on a date, for the first time in months. On a date and silenced by the thought of it, wanting too much for the next thing I said to be perfect.

There was a band playing inside Ric's, so Hayley grabbed an outside table and I pushed through to the bar. I held up two fingers and shouted, ‘Hoegaarden,' and the bartender cupped his hand to his ear. I shouted again and he said something, twice, and then shrugged. He went to the fridge and came back with two bottles I didn't recognise. He pointed to the word ‘Hoegaarden' and seemed to say it was all they had.

As I made my way out through the crowd, I had the idea that Hayley might be gone, that she'd changed her mind. I looked for her through the window and saw her, still sitting there, her arms resting on the steel arms of the chair, her hands in her lap.

There were bar stools lined up against the back wall, and I bumped my way past the knees of everyone on them to make it to the door. When I got to the table, Hayley took her beer from me and clinked it against the neck of mine in a toast.

‘So, how was that?' she said. ‘Back at the Spur. They're crazier than they know.'

‘I think the word “character” may have been invented for guys like Ross. I had no idea there were people like that still around. And yet he's talking about ABNs and things. It was . . . very strange.'

‘I know,' she said, emphatically, as if it was something she had needed to share for a while. ‘And they don't
have a clue. Out the front it's, like, sleazy to the point of cliché. Out the back it feels like a family business. They'll even line you up with an accountant and talk through your superannuation options. And you noticed that Ross wanted to get in the point about being okay with the Liquor Licensing crew? They're through us all the time, but Ross is pretty smart and they know he knows the rules at least as well as they do. I think there was a dicey moment in the early nineties when he nearly got done for body-slide massage, but it was all a question of interpretation.' She stopped, and took a mouthful of beer. ‘I don't even know what it is – body-slide massage – I'm just aware of the case. He agreed to get the girls who did it to change technique slightly, so then it wasn't quite prostitution. I think that's why his wife has to be the licensee, though we never see her. He's still hilariously old school in some ways, though. He's got used to paying tax instead of paying bent cops, but he still keeps an old gun in his bottom drawer. I've seen it. An old handgun and a cardboard box with bullets in it.'

‘Ross has a gun?'

‘Police issue, from about 1980.' These were the stories she couldn't tell in the corridor of the Silver Spur. ‘It's a hangover from back then.'

‘And, what, he keeps it in case the accountant gives Vixen bad advice about her superannuation?'

She laughed, and put on a Ross voice and menaced me with a finger pistol. ‘Didn't I tell you not to make her overweight in international equities? That's the last warning, Brian. Get ready to meet the fish.' She dropped her thumb, fired the gun. ‘I don't know why he keeps it. He's a good guy, though. Flexible rosters,
time off for exams. Plus the pay's not bad at all. Best job I've had in a while.' She turned her beer around, and took a close look at the label. ‘So, this is Hoegaarden, but not the regular one?'

‘Yeah. It was noisy in there.' The label featured Adam and Eve, falling to the temptation of beer. Above them, it read ‘De Verboden Frucht'. ‘I think this is the only Hoegaarden they've got. I was probably supposed to get it in a glass, but . . .'

‘It's good. Never met a Belgian beer I didn't like. Hey, you wrote about Belgians, didn't you? Famous Belgians? I looked you up. I'm still not really sure how your job works.'

‘That makes two of us. Or in fact several of us.'

She had gone looking for the blogs. She had looked me up.

She asked me how I came up with the ideas and I told her about the virtual life I tended to lead, search-engining my way to topics that might have some kind of spring to them, putting myself through tasks that might trigger stories. I told her about the photocopier repair guy, and my growing fascination with the evangelical promises of infomercials. There was a seed for a blog there, for certain. I talked about some of my best failed attempts to lead a blog-worthy life. For one entire week I had worn a red string on my wrist, feigning a kabbalah connection, and absolutely nothing happened. No one saw it, no one said a thing. But even in failure, there was room for speculation, and it all fitted into the ‘Random' brief.